Times Journalist Held In Contempt

October 8, 2004|By Maria Newman and Adam Liptak The New York Times

A federal judge in Washington on Thursday held a reporter from The New York Times in contempt after she refused to divulge confidential sources to prosecutors investigating the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity.

Judge Thomas F. Hogan of U.S. District Court in Washington ordered the reporter, Judith Miller, jailed until she agrees to testify about her sources before a grand jury, but she will remain free pending an appeal of her case.

Miller faces a jail term of up to 18 months.

The case stems from an investigation by a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, about who disclosed the identity of CIA officer, Valerie Plame, whose name appeared in a column written by the syndicated columnist Robert Novak last year.

Disclosing the identity of a covert officer of the Central Intelligence Agency can be a crime.

Miller never wrote an article about Plame, but the judge has said she "contemplated writing one."

On Thursday, Hogan cited a Supreme Court ruling that reporters do not have absolute First Amendment protection from testifying about confidential sources. He said Fitzgerald had exhausted other avenues to obtain evidence of the disclosure before issuing the subpoena to Miller.

"The record here has convinced the court that the special counsel has made a limited, deferential approach to the press," Hogan said. "We have a classic confrontation between conflicting interests," meaning between the freedom of the press and the obligation to investigate a criminal matter.

After the hearing, Miller spoke to reporters, along with Bill Keller, the paper's executive editor, and Floyd Abrams, a leading First Amendment lawyer who was representing Miller.

"I'm very disappointed that I've been found in contempt of court for an article that I never wrote and that the Times never published," Miller said. "I find it truly frightening that journalists can be put in jail for doing their jobs."

It was Novak who first identified Plame, in a syndicated column published on July 14, 2003, when he described her as "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." He did so in the context of a column he wrote about Plame's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat sent by the CIA to Africa in 2002 to investigate the possibility Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. Citing "two senior administration officials" as sources, Novak reported that it was Plame who had suggested sending her husband to Africa.

Novak has so far refused to say whether he has been subpoenaed in Fitzgerald's investigation.